Grayling: Almost 40% of Czech Parliament members are on candidate lists in regional elections | Czech Radio: interviews, infographic

Almost 40% of members of the Czech Parliament (86 members of the Chamber of Deputies, the Lower Chamber of the Parliament, and 26 members of the Senate, the Upper Chamber) will compete in the upcoming regional elections that will be held on 7 and 8 October 2016. Some of the Members of the Parliament will run for regional governors. In 2014, regional governor of the South Moravian region Michal Hašek resigned from the position of the Member of the Parliament, because "the function of the regional governor is a full-time job", a recently published article/analysis by Grayling quotes his words. An argument against holding two positions at the same time, for example, is that the politicians at the national level would like to stay in touch with the people (at the regional and/or municipal level).

The Czech Radio published a set of interviews with all candidates (who agreed to participate) in the Senate elections to be held on 7-8 (1st round) and 14-15 October 2016 (2nd round). Six questions and a time limit to respond. Click here to listen to the interviews and view infographic data. The Czech Radio released a similar set of interviews with all candidates (who agreed to participate in this project) in regional elections.

According to the Czech News Agency, political parties have not changed their campaigning style much and there have been no big innovations. Read details in Czech.

Also, Transparency International Czech Republic published results of their monitoring of campaign financing. They used eight critaria of transparency and assessed openness of politicians/candidates in elections to disclose information about financing and other aspects of their election campaign and co-workers. TI estimates that the total cost of campaigning related to elections held in the Czech Republic in 2016 could amount to around 0.5 bn CZK. Read details (in Czech).

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